Meals out of home

Meals for canteens, schools and business are established taking into account the lessons from the diet, assuming that dinner would include:

raw vegetables;
a complex dish comprising a source of animal protein (meat, eggs, fish, offal), a source of cooked vegetables and a source of complex carbohydrates (starches, cereal or bread);
cheese or dairy;
a fruit (or fruit salad);
water for hydration (1.5 l / h of drinking water in total).

When these restaurants operate in self-service mode, the meals in general continues to be balanced in the sense of formal diet as soon as one of these dishes is missing, or if the contrary is doubled. It also cease to be if accompanied by a sweet drink.

The diet has long been a private affair. But the public health problems posed by food have led governments to intervene in this area.

In France, the government repeated dietary messages to the attention of the young people in particular (“eat five fruits and vegetables per day”, “Do not eat too much fat, too sweet and too salty”), particularly in the context television programs.

In France, the “Week of Taste” (end of October), which causes many such initiatives in schools, has five core values, one of which focuses on nutrition.

In France, Social Security has calculated that it was profitable to reimburse the patient, when diabetes is newly discovered, dietary courses are given in hospitals. Indeed, the knowledge of a plan, so there is still time to act (and subject to it being applied) can avoid several decades of costly complications that might appear otherwise in less than ten years, and irreversibly (especially blindness due to retinopathy, and renal dysfunction). Such courses are organized so permanently.

Food companies have sometimes abused the qualitative ‘diet’ to sell their products could soon be banned in European labelling. The health claim is a powerful marketing tool to increase the consumption of a food by emphasizing one side “virtuous” of its benefits, which obscures any imbalances of the food (food too greasy and too sweet, which would put forward its calcium and iron, for example).